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Lead AI Data Engineer

EXL

Posted 25 Jun 2026

GurugramHigh payGreat Place to Work
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Key Responsibilities

1. Solution Architecture & Technical Leadership

  • Architect enterprise-grade agentic and LLM solutions (single-agent, multi-agent, tool-driven workflows)
  • Define scalable GenAI system design patterns (RAG, orchestration layers, evaluation frameworks)
  • Act as the technical anchor for GenAI initiatives across projects
  • Drive design reviews, architecture governance, and best practices

2. Agentic AI & LLM Engineering

  • Design and build agentic systems using LLMs for use cases such as: 
    • Knowledge assistants
    • Document automation & intelligence
    • Workflow orchestration
  • Implement advanced prompt engineering strategies, prompt orchestration, and reasoning chains
  • Build tool-calling / function-calling frameworks for agent workflows

3. RAG & Retrieval Systems

  • Lead end-to-end implementation of RAG pipelines
    • Data ingestion → chunking → embeddings → vector indexing → retrieval → response generation
  • Optimise retrieval quality (recall, relevance, grounding)
  • Evaluate and benchmark different architectures

4. Productisation & Engineering Excellence

  • Develop production-grade APIs/services (FastAPI, Flask, etc.)
  • Drive code quality, testing standards, and reusable architecture components
  • Ensure solutions are performance optimised (latency, cost, reliability)

5. Governance, Safety & Evaluation

  • Implement LLM guardrails
    • Hallucination control
    • Safety filters
    • Policy enforcement
  • Define evaluation frameworks
    • Response quality metrics
    • RAG benchmarking
    • Human-in-the-loop validation

6. Collaboration & Delivery Leadership

  • Partner with: 
    • Data Engineering → pipelines, data quality, governance
    • MLOps → deployment, CI/CD, monitoring
    • Business/Product → use-case alignment
  • Drive end-to-end delivery ownership across multiple projects

7. Technical Leadership Responsibilities (Critical Addition)

  • Mentor and guide junior engineers and project teams
  • Conduct technical reviews, solution walkthroughs, and code reviews
  • Support pre-sales / RFPs / solution proposals with architecture inputs
  • Drive reusable accelerators, frameworks, and COE assets
  • Stay ahead of industry evolution and help shape EXL’s GenAI strategy
  • Influence technology choice, design decisions, and roadmap planning
 

Must-Have Skills

Experience

  • 9–12 years total experience
  • 2–4+ years hands-on in LLM / GenAI delivery (production use cases)
 

LLM / GenAI & Agentic Engineering

  • Strong hands-on experience with:
    • LLMs (Claude, OpenAI, etc.)
    • RAG pipelines and retrieval optimisation
    • GPT + Agentic AI implementation experience
  • Experience with:
    • LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks
    • Agent orchestration and tool-calling architectures
  • Deep understanding of:
    • LLM limitations, evaluation, and optimisation strategies
 

Core Engineering

  • Strong Python/Pyspark engineering expertise (production-grade development) with proven API integration experience
  • Deep data analysis experience and handling large volume of data
  • Fabric/Azure Databricks/Snowflake data engineering integration skills
  • Good exposure to:
    • Cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP)
    • SQL
    • Containers, CI/CD, monitoring
 

Data / AI Foundations (Mandatory)

Prior experience in one or more:

  • Data Engineering (ETL/ELT, pipelines, orchestration)
  • Data Science / ML lifecycle (especially NLP)
  • Analytics engineering / data products
 

Leadership Capabilities

  • Experience leading solution design or small teams
  • Ability to translate business problems into AI solutions
  • Strong stakeholder communication and influencing skills
 

Good-to-Have / Preferred

  • Fine-tuning approaches: LoRA / PEFT / prompt tuning
  • Experience with Azure AI stack (Azure OpenAI, AI Search)
  • Exposure to: 
    • Enterprise security & data privacy in GenAI
    • Coding agents / autonomous agent frameworks
  • Experience in insurance / BFSI domains (valuable for EXL use cases)